Last November I wrote about the importance of customer feedback (“How Does Your Customer Service Measure Up?”). Our company tries to stimulate it by providing as the back side of our job ticket a postage-paid self-mailer postcard asking questions about the performance of both our dispatch and field personnel.
This is valuable but not sufficient in itself to give you a clear picture. The postcards rely on the customers to take the initiative. We also try to audit the performance of our service techs with random phone calls to recent customers. These calls serve three distinct purposes:
1) To monitor the customer relations performance of our service technicians.
2) To see whether our service techs are pitching service contracts and leaving behind promotional remnants.
3) It’s my philosophy that you need to keep in touch with your customers three or four times a year. This gives us a good excuse to initiate one of those contacts.
Scripted Questionnaire: Under the heading “Quality Control Questionnaire,” our operations manual provides a fully scripted series of questions and responses to ask customers. The calls, usually 70 or 75 a month, are made by employees in our dispatching department. They select job tickets at random, except for an effort to get samplings from each service tech.
The form they use requires them to list the date and time of each call, as well as the dates and times of unsuccessful contact attempts. There also are spaces to list all the information required to identify the job. The initial contact does as follows:
Hello Mr./Mrs. ( Name of customer)! This is (name of employee) from Blau Plumbing. We recently performed work for you and as part of our total quality management program, we are following up with you to obtain feedback on our service. Would you have a few minutes to answer some brief questions? If the answer is no, we ask if there’s a more convenient time to call back. If the answer is still no, we simply say, Very well, thank you for your time, and note that the customer declined to participate in our survey.
The next inquiry is: Are you the person who placed the order with us? Were you present when our service technician performed the service? If the person answers no to either question, we ask if it might be possible to speak to the proper person.
To the person who placed the order, we ask What was your reason for selecting Blau Plumbing? The most common responses are repeat customer, suggested by others or via one of our marketing campaigns or ads. Then we ask the person to rate our telephone representative in the area of courtesy, helpfulness and knowledge.
Key Inquires: The rest of the inquires are directed at the person present during the technician’s visit. We ask if he arrived when expected, if he took steps to protect the property before beginning work and if he cleaned up afterward.
Then come some key inquires that enable us to monitor whether our service technicians are doing what they are suppose to be doing to promote business for the company:
Did our technician offer to place emergency identification tags on the shutoff valves in your home?
Did our technicians perform a free carbon monoxide test and explain the results? (Skipped on drain cleaning calls.)
Did our technicians affix $3-off day-glow orange stickers to your furnace, hot water heater, sump pump, disposal, or other PHC equipment? Notice how many sticker opportunities present themselves. How many of these opportunities did you miss?
Did our technician inform you of any of the following money-saving service protection plans offered by Blau Plumbing? We refer to our Energy Saving Agreement, Action Root Destroyer Program and Water Heater Lifetime Warranty. We then ask if the customer would like any additional information about any of these programs, and when it would be convenient for a customer service rep to follow up with a contact.
We wrap up the survey by asking customers to rate the service technician on appearance, attitude, knowledge and overall performance. We also ask them to rate Blau Plumbing’s overall service and whether “The value of Blau Plumbing’s service for the price paid was excellent/very good/good/fair/poor,” and whether they would call us again.
One final question: “Is there anything we could have done to serve you better?” The survey concludes with a thank you for their business and wishing them a nice morning or afternoon.
Sometimes we follow up with the same customers who mailed evaluation cards. It’s not unusual for them to respond differently on the phone.
Sometimes a spontaneous phone conversation gives a better indication of how they really feel. Also likely to show up is what sales consultant label “buyer’s remorse.” That is, people tend to feel upbeat about a purchase when brand new, but afterwards they tend to dwell more heavily on the cost.
On Their Toes: I would put our company’s service techs up against anyone else’s in the industry, but they still tend to get lax in the field if you don’t check up on them now and then. The last time we conducted our monthly survey we found out that some of our guys were not putting up stickers or valve tags.
To them, these are just troublesome tasks. To us, they are key tactics to help lock in business and generate calls in the future. You can’t “ask” your service techs to do these things. You must present it as a non-negotiable demand. Let them know that if they don’t do it, they might be in line for a “career adjustment,” and you must do quality control audits to keep them on their toes.
Besides telephone monitoring, it would not be a bad idea from time to time to recruit friends or relatives to stage service calls and report on employee performance. As of this writing our company as not done this, but we are considering it.